Fall comes early

It seems like fall has arrived early. The weather has been very pleasant in the midwest with cool mornings and warm days. Sunny and clear. I barely got enough heat from the 3 weeks of hot summer to thaw me out from the winter. Yet, here we go again, back to the darkness and cold.

My garden has been delightful. I have had a great crop of cucumbers and plenty of basil and parsley. The tomatoes are few but delicious. Four fat eggplant berries drip voluptuously from their stems. It is almost too late; now is the time to get working on fall crops. I hope to get a few more rows of carrots in, some arugula, and another cabbage. One cabbage is in and it's hanging on after a vicious attack from little green caterpillars. Its partner did not make it - my dog Winnie decided she needed that baby cabbage plant, picked it up (peat pot and all), and carried it across the yard. She tasted it for good measure. It never recovered.

Quilting work has been slow and pensive. I have been interested to work on my "Mom's Quilt" project, a large pieced wall hanging started in September 2001. I remember the exact date because I bought the fabrics over the weekend after the 9/11 attacks. We had gone up to visit Mom and Dad and see a Penn State / University of Virginia football game. Like many public events right after the attacks, the game was cancelled. Instead, we went to Dayton VA and visited a quilt museum and shopped in a quaint Mennonite village. There we found the beautiful fabrics for this wall hanging.

I am terribly remiss in this project. It is 7 years old, after all. I am hand quilting it, and that is why it is taking so long. I got frustrated with marking the quilt for the quilting. The quilting goes along fine. I am so close to done, I really have no excuse not to finish it. Thank goodness I have the motivation to pick it back up. Progress was stalled recently because my dog, Winnie, decided she needed to floss her teeth, and my spool of quilting thread was just the thing.

Detect a theme here? Dogs...

I'm always doing more projects, though. I have more fabric for my "Aunt Millie's Garden" quilt, but I haven't started sewing on it just yet. Much of the prep work is done. Yesterday I bought some yarn for a bulky knitted sweater, thanks to a nice sale at Michael's (an arts and crafts store). It's a nice rust color, in Lion Brand's Thick and Quick wool blend yarn. I haven't made any more blocks for the log cabin bed quilt - I think I have completed around 60 out of the 80 needed. Gettin' there....

My latest whim is learning crochet. It's a little pastime, nothing serious. The look of crochet does not excite me except in certain applications (like edging lace). It's quite easy, so another fun thing to do.

Life goes on. I am neither happy nor sad. I am busy, but I want to be lazy. I want to be home doing my own things. I have indulged this feeling for the summer - if I didn't mention it in a previous post, I decided to quit the singing group after all. It just wasn't fun. More of my time is my time and I am satisfied.

As usual, I dread the coming winter. I need a plan to fight the oncoming depression. More on that later.